Kitty Anne

She’s spent her life finding new ways into the movies.

Kitty has worked in front of the camera and behind it, written for the screen, programmed films, written about them, sat on juries and panels, and moderated filmmaker conversations. She’s also spent a loooootttttt of late nights figuring out how to get people into a room to see something she really wanted them to see!

Programming became less about picking movies and more about who gets to see them in the first place. Kitty saw how easily assumptions about an audience turn into decisions made for them: what they’ll watch, what they’ll understand, what belongs on a screen in the South. She saw the same thing happen on the other side of the screen, where money, time, caregiving, geography, industry connections, and access to resources can determine which filmmakers get to keep going and which films ever get finished.

It started after dark.

Through Hello Huntsville Horror, Kitty built a local audience around genre screenings and events, and the folks who showed up didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a horror crowd. Some of her biggest supporters have been older women. Turns out, you don’t get old and stop being curious!

Hauntsville Film Fest grew from another frustration: wanting to see women, femme, and nonbinary filmmakers given real space in genre cinema instead of being treated like an occasional programming theme. The festival centers genre films written, directed, or produced by women, femme-presenting, and nonbinary filmmakers, and that commitment to femme and queer voices runs through all of Kitty’s work.

Her programming has since taken her across the Southern film community, working with festivals, theaters, filmmakers, and fellow programmers. She’s introduced films, hosted filmmaker conversations, and helped emerging filmmakers make a little more sense of submissions and the festival world.

Then the house lights came up on some bigger questions.

Why should living in the South mean having fewer films available to you? Why do we assume audiences won’t be interested in something they’ve never had the opportunity to encounter? How many people could make a movie but never imagine themselves as filmmakers? And how many good films get started here but never make it to a screen because somebody was missing money, childcare, an editor, a connection, or simply someone who knew what the next step was?

Reel South Cinema brings together years of programming, festivals, writing, community organizing, and advocacy, but the goal is bigger than putting on more screenings. Kitty wants to help build a South where more people can encounter cinema, more people can imagine themselves making it, and fewer practical barriers decide who gets to participate.

She believes Southern audiences are more curious than they’re often given credit for. She believes Southern filmmakers don’t have to leave home, go to film school, or make movies for a living before they’re allowed to call themselves filmmakers. And she believes the South shouldn’t be treated like a theme or a market somebody else gets to define.

Kitty is also a film writer and zine maker, creating independent publications about movies, history, identity, fandom, and the strange personal ways films stay with us.

She lives and works in Five Points, Huntsville, Alabama.